Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Cataclysm Profession Bonuses

I mentioned towards the end of my last post that I would be switching my Hunter from Skinning to Engineering. Well the little caveat I made about not gimping myself turned out to be pretty important. I had a brief Twitter conversation with Fiest the Rogue. If you care about high end PVE raiding, you need to be following @FiesttheRogue. He is a tremendous resource and very helpful. He gave me a link to an EJ article and explained to me that for melee DPS and Hunters Engineering is not competitive with what is provided by the other professions. Its fantastic for casters apparently, but I'm not a caster.
Other classes can get equal STR or INT to the AGI you see here. Tanks have the option for Stamina. Alchemy - mixology (longer, better flasks), Alchemist Stone (special trinket - Mastery), and Flask of Enhancement (special flask +80 AGI) Blacksmithing - socket bracers, gloves (2 extra gems ~=+80 AGI) Enchanting - Ring Enchants (AGI to two rings ~= 80 AGI) Inscription - Special Shoulder Enchants (+80 AGI over the reputation enchant) Jewelcrafting - JC only gem (+27 AGI over a regular gem, use 3 = 81 AGI) Leatherworking - Bracer enchant (+130 AGI) Tailoring - Cloak enchant proc 800 AP for 15 seconds Herbalism - 480 Haste (2 minute cooldown) Mining (120 Stam) Skinning - 80 Crit Engineering - i359 Epic Helm (equal stats to a Raid Drop), Engineering only gems (provide secondary stats like Mastery, hit, Crit) - only go into Engy heads, Absorb shield belt enchant, Armor to Gloves, Healing potion on gloves (may or may not activate the potion cooldown), INT to gloves (12 sec dur, 1 min cd), Nature damage to gloves (2 min cooldown), increase effect of mana pots to gloves, Loot-A-Rang (loot at a distance), Goblin Barbeque (puts out the equivelent of a Cataclysm fish feast).
The profession bonus for Cataclysm looks to be around 80 agility for Hunters. This is what Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Inscription, and Jewelcrafting give you. (Let's not quibble over 1 additional AGI that Jewelcrafting gets).
With my current crop of 80s I have Jewelcrafting(Paladin), Enchanting (Warrior), and Leatherworking (Druid) covered. I can also mine (Warrior/Paladin) and Skin (Druid). Both of my Hunters professions (Skin/Mine) are well covered. I'm not looking to create an industry, so doubling up on a profession I already have isn't the worse thing I could do.
Ranking the gathering professions for Hunters for best to worse it would go Herbalism, Skinning, and Mining, but none are good. I do like all my toons to have at least one gathering profession to be self supporting. I just don't have the playtime, especially early in an expansion to have the farmer run out and try to gather mats for the producer. I tried it in Wrath when Honors was still Engineering/Jewelcrafting and I used my Hunter to mine for him. I think it was part of what slowed down Honors so much from getting to the cap.This is a trade off I'm wiling to make.
I would really like to have Engineering on my Hunter, so I want to see what the difference really is. If we take the DPS Glove enchant, Tazik Shocker, we see it can do 4320 to 5280 Nature damage on a 2 minute cooldown. If we used nothing else, and take the low number of 4320 damage (ignoring that it could be buffed by spell damage taken debuffs), it would give us a DPS of 36dps. The high number gives us 44 DPS. Yeah, not impressed.
But how much DPS do we really get out of 80 AGI?
Well, I decided to do a little experiment. I’ve discovered if you want some ‘alone time’ with the dummies, you go to Silvermoon, so off to Silvermoon I went. I got au natural and fired away with just autoshots for five minutes (easily timed with the Rapid Fire cooldown). Then I put on the Webspinner Boots of Agility (+78 AGI). The next step was to bang away again for five more minutes.
First up is my Naked DPS, and the breakdown.
Now I equipped the boots.
And I did the next round of tests. I was Survival for both tests.
The DPS went up by about 8DPS, and that is with 2 less misses. The average shot went up by 20 damage. Remember we get 36 to 44DPS from the Engineering glove enchant.
From this I can conclude that Engineering is actually a DPS increase over the other professions. This result was very surprising to me. Can you see anything I did wrong in the experiment? Is there another explanation for what is going on here? What do you think?
I think I’m rerolling Engineer.

9 comments:

Argon
said...

From what I read over at EJ, dummy tests are not good for determining your DPS. Dummies behave kind of weirdly, and you are missing all sorts of critical raid buffs that can affect scaling. For instance, if you had Blessing of Kings, you'd get another 5% agility, turning that +80 into +84.

The one thing missing from this test is the increased crit from the agility in your specials. At level 85 that'll probably be less than 1% crit, at 80 it is just about 1% crit) equate to about 1% crit (I haven't seen the calculations, but you are actually talking about 97.75 agility given the survival specialization) Two talents that could affect this are Toxicology and Sic 'Em (in Marks).

From that perspective you should probably repeat the tests keeping 100% uptime of serpent sting and black arrow.

Agility is also affecting your attack power and hence your specials are hitting harder too... I'm not sure if you can discount the differences though because they will scale linearly. I guess you have tested that you will gain in autoattack dps with more agility - and that won't outweight the dps of the trinket, but you are also hitting harder with your specials.

Finally - the damage from the trinket doesn't scale with raid buffs - whereas agility does. So from that perspective to truly see how different it is you really need to have the agility buffs too (I think its just mark of the wild/blessing of kings - you have the other one as part of hunting party).

I don't know if femaledwarf.com is up to date for the Cataclysm data (it looks to have the new talent trees) but you could also do a full simulation over there.

I'll state right up front that I was suprised by the result. I expected AGI to beat the Engineering enchant rather handily, but that was not the case.

I'd like for the Engineering enchant to not be a huge dps loss over 80 AGI, but my ultimate goal here is to find facts.

Now I understand the Dummy's have quite a few variables, but I did the best to design the test to control them. There was no one else at the dummy (no changing debuffs). I was using only Auto-Shots, so the only debuff that could have effected it would be the Sunder Armor type which were not present during either test. I'm not sure we can just dismiss the results out of hand simply because we employed a Target Dummy as a way to verify / challenge theory(craft).

For instance, in this article by WoW.com (http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/10/18/scattered-shots-4-0-1-hunter-gems-glyphs-and-stat-weights/), the author uses Dummy Tests (while acknowledging the issues with using them) to support the conclusion that he has "pretty good confidence that 1 mastery rating is better than 1 haste rating".

In addition, there are Raid buffs (like Spell Damage taken) that would enhance the Engineering enchant, but I felt for the sake of controlling the number of variables to limit the number of Buffs. However, to give 80 AGI some scaling, I used a SV spec with Hunting Party which increased AGI by 10%.

Do we know if anyone has theorycrafted out how much of a DPS increase 80 AGI would be?

What would be a better designed test to reach a conclusion on 80AGI versus the Engineering enchant if the Dummy is considered unreliable?

Upon thinking more about it - you can't just do it as a test on autoshot. In a patchwerk like fight that dps is going to increase with 80 agility as you expect - but autoshot is only going to be about 17% (I'm going off my theoretical dps from femaledwarf.com) of your damage.

You could perhaps extrapolate out to say that it'll also increase the rest of your damage by the same percentage (in this case it's a 4% increase). Making this simpler by using the autoshot contribution to your dps as 20% - you'd end up with a total dps increase of about 38 - putting it on par with the engineering increase.

Just for comparison I took a look over at femaledwarf.com to see what difference +40 agility would do (you can add arbitrary stats at the bottom of the gear section). This is the current bonus based on gear (i.e. 2 extra gems for being a blacksmith). Unfortunately you can't just stick +80 in there because of the rating conversion each point of agility is worth less as you level. However, it maths/simulates out that I'd get a 59 dps increase (that's with only self buffs). Can that be extrapolated to level 85 - I'm not sure because my theoretical maximum dps should also be higher, which should also mean that my dps increase would be that much higher at level 85. i.e. 59 dps is a 1.5% dps increase, which given we say double our actual dps at level 85 means we would be gaining 118 dps instead.

Note - this would probably also apply to your comparison in your test - you are really comparing level 80 versus level 85 damage. Maybe try out the same test on a level 85 hunter on beta?

So I'm really not sure that the engineering enchant will prove worth it? You'd really need to wait and see what the spreadsheets are saying when updated to level 85?

I'm not sure that taking off all your gear and putting on just one item is a good way to simulate 80 agi -- you're losing out on a lot of synergy between stats.

For example, if you have a naked crit of (say) 10%, and your average non-crit auto-shot does 400 damage, then 10% of the time you'll do 800 damage and 90% of the time you'll do 400 damage - that averages out to 440 damage per shot over e.g. 1000 shots.

If you have a crit rate of 50%, the same 400 damage autoshot will have an average of 600 damage over 1000 shots. Dividing things out, you could say that 40% crit increased your damage by 160, so 10% crit = 40 damage.

Now let's say that you get an AP bonus, and your average autoshot starts to do 500 damage on a non-crit. With 10% crit chance, you'll average 550 damage. With a 50% crit chance, you'll average 750 damage. 40% crit is now worth 200 damage, rather than 160.

Haste has a similar result on increasing your DPS by increasing your focus regen (and your auto-attack speed?). Your best bet is to work out about how much crit/haste/mastery you'd have at level 85, and then see how much 80 agi would boost your dps (mostly by giving 160 AP, but there would be some additional crit chance, too.)

I agree with Argent, I'm not much of a WoW theorycrafter but as an experamentalist (is that a word?) my gut doesn't feel right about taking off all your gear. You may get a closer answer by only going barefoot with all the rest of your gear equipped and then rerunning with the boots on.

I think most people have already pointed out that being naked is not a good comparison.

Another way of putting it would be that agility scales while the gloves do not scale, at all, ever. Sure you may get a spell damage debuff on the target, but that's also static and will be there on day one and will never increase. Because agility adds crit, it will scale with your increase in attack power.

Think of it this way, the gloves add lets say 5000 damage every 120 seconds. If we only take the crit contribution from agility alone, ignoring the attack power, will that lead to at least 1 more crit in 120 seconds? I'm not sure about numbers at 85, but I'm pretty sure a single additional crit special will do a hell of a lot more than 5000 damage.

Plus don't your pets scale with your gear? They also won't benefit with the engineering gloves.

I acknowledge my methodology was suspect, but I will disagree with the premise that the Glove enchant does not scale. I direct your attention to the Survival Mastery Bonus: Mastery: Essence of the Viper: elemental damage increased by 8%. Each point of Mastery increases elemental damage by an additional 1%

The gloves do Nature Damage which I believe is covered by the Elemental damage portion of the Mastery. So as the Survival Hunter gets more Mastery, the Gloves hit harder. That is, by definition, they scale.